The Future of User Experience

Let’s face it, people deserve a better class of user experience designers. After all, attention isn’t cheap and the future will be dominated by the companies that provide time savings more than money savings. With audio, smart devices, and now AI taking over the conversational interface, there are three core trends that are transforming the world of user experience.

1. AppsEvery publisher, from the point of launch, is working hard to triple down on efforts around improving app store optimisation. To have a presence on the front page digital real estate among the top 28 front page apps is coveted, to say the least. It’s phenomenal for branding, for building credibility and incentivising trial. That said, from a UX perspective, I foresee fewer brands investing in their own half-baked apps. While the true power of artificial intelligence is at least ten years ago from having a real impact on humanity, it’s still worth the consideration.

2. EnterpriseLaunched in 2013, Slack has over a million users today entirely from the enterprise space and is worth billions. Facebook for Work (FFW) is one of many attempts by consumer-side messaging platforms to hone in on a slice of the pie. While FFW struggles to gain traction due to the implicit nature of its consumer side distraction mechanism, marketing organisation have signed up for trial periods from an experimentation standpoint. The prime reason Slack has taken off as it has is due to the integrations and bots. The latter enable the Slack users to manage projects, conduct polls, and gain reports from Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and New Relics. Teams also have access to social media mentions, can schedule notifications that coincide with the completion of tasks, and on a lighter note – hang the system at lunch time for an hour to reinforce the value of a meal.

3. DialogueGiven the above and from watching job boards from the world’s leading technology companies that are likely to engage in enterprise, it is evidently crystal clear that user interface designers with a specialisation and expertise with dialogue design will be in high demand. They will design and build the responses from the AI bots that the users of the system will see. From passive text responses to taking over via Teamviewer. The teams will also use the tools most frequently utilised by the users of the platform, to get ideas on integration and to understand value derived from the user experience.

The changes have already begun to take hold. Given that this region tends to be three to six months behind its counterpart developed markets, the time is now to get a head start on these trends instead of scrambling for relevance at the last minute. For help in getting there halfway, reach me on hamna.anwar@centric.ae today.

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Hamna Anwar is the director of innovation at Centric, leading projects around digital startups and helping them achieve commercial success with localised business models. She can be reached on hamna.anwar@centric.ae